Any Guide in making an AI?

[Rexxx]

Originally posted by Ruatha:
Is there any guides on how to make an AI?

There are lots of Posts about specific AI modding topics. However, the only guide I know of is Atraikius' very helpful sheet about ship designing. You can find it here:
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/newup...1040385338.zip

I want a peaceful AI that avoids building fleets, don't make treaties, Send's very few Messages. Builds strong individual ships. Uses a lot of intelligence, such as resource procurement and PPP.
Tries to avoid war at almost any cost.

It's for the Invisible shipset.

There are several peaceful AIs:
To name just a few from the TDM-Modpack:
Mephisto's Earth Alliance, Narn Regime, Toron
Alpha Kodiak's Vaxim
God Emperor's Klingons and Praetorians.

The stock EEE and Phong also try to avoid wars as far as possible.

In the politics.txt you can define the highest allowed treaty and the kind of message your race will send.
Check the politics-file of Daynarr's Xi'Chung (TDM), they don't like treaties and never allow more than non-aggression. I don't know if it is possible to allow no treaty at all.
Setting all Send message topics to "no" should reduce your communication drastically (politics.txt).
In the speech.txt-file you can define the number of Messages for a certain topic. I never tried that but maybe setting these numbers to zero should lead to a very silent race.

In the fleets.txt file you can set the number of your fleets (depending of the ships or planets you have) and the percentage of your ships used in fleets. Another possibility to avoid fleets is to create Attack Bases as your standard ship. The AI never integrates them into fleets.

IMO using a lot of intelligence is pretty useless in the confines of SE IV, it's a waste of facilities and resources. Tampa Gamer's Drakol (TDM) are perfect "schemers". However, when it comes to war, they got crushed by other AIs quite easily. Intelligence is a nice feature but relying on it is deadly. As far as I know there is no way to define the Intel projects initiated by the AI, normally it uses more than 50% of its points for Counterintelligence. The rest is spent for randomly chosen projects, sometimes even resource procurement.
To make things worse Intelligence can be the reason for wars, some AIs get quite angry when you spy upon them.

[ January 16, 2003, 09:30: Message edited by: Rexxx ]